Ready Player Eth2 - The Daily Gwei #124
The Beacon Chain goes live on December 1st!
Well, we did it - against all odds, we did it! The deposit contract reached the minimum ETH required ahead of time and the eth2 Beacon Chain genesis will happen as planned on December 1st at 12PM UTC. Looks like we will be launching in 2020 after all!
It was an emotional day for me yesterday as it really sunk in that we are now less than 7 days away from Ethereum’s proof of stake implementation going live on a mainnet. This has been in the works for over 6 years(!) and is one of the main reasons I got so excited about Ethereum when I first discovered it in early 2017. I have spent every single day of my life since then learning about Ethereum, contributing to the ecosystem as much as I could and of course, stacking as much ETH as I could so that I could one day stake it. Now, the time is finally here and I couldn’t be more excited.
Alright, let’s recap where we stand right now. We only needed 524,288 ETH to start the Beacon Chain but, at time of writing, we are at over 680,000 ETH with deposits still flowing in - this means that the current APY is ~18.9% (though this will come down over time as more ETH is staked). As expected, we saw the most amount of deposits come in over the last 4-5 days as there was no incentive to deposit early and huge opportunity costs in doing so (especially for whales). The over 680,000 ETH belongs to around 2,000 unique depositors with the top 10 depositors accounting for ~30% of the total stake. Now, just because these depositors are unique doesn’t mean that each one represents an actual human so it’s inaccurate to use this metric as a proxy for how “decentralized” the network will be on launch. Though I’d wager that not many people actually went to the hassle of depositing from different wallets.
Something that I should note here is that if you didn’t send your ETH to the deposit contract yet, then your validators unfortunately won’t be included in the genesis event on December 1st. But don’t fret - you can still send your ETH to the deposit contract and spin up validators at any time. Though, just be aware that there is a “validator queue” which means only 900 new validators can join the validator set (aka the staking set) each day - getting in sooner is better! Additionally, not being part of the genesis event isn’t a big deal - it’s mainly for bragging rights and getting your hands on a unique POAP - okay maybe it’s a big deal because of the POAP!
Finally, I want to extend a huge congratulations and thank you to the thousands of individuals that made this all a reality - your names will be etched into the history books of Ethereum forever. Now, the teams can focus on delivering the next parts of eth2 - namely sharding and the eth1 <> eth2 merger. Meanwhile, eth1 will continue to explode in usage across things like DeFi and keep innovating at layer 2 - parallel building is fun!
Today was exciting but let’s not forget our roots and humble beginnings as we expand Ethereum to billions of users over the next few decades - we’re just getting started.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.
Thank you to everyone who made this historical milestone possible. I’m deeply proud of belonging to the Ethereum community.